Just Like Blood
by MissForsythe
Summary: Season 4, one person at a time.
1. Just Like Blood (prologue)

Title: Just Like Blood

Author: MissForsythe

Summary: Season 4, as I prefer it would go/have gone.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Chapter titles so far are all owed to Tom McRae.

Author's Notes: Somehow I think they're dragging this Lexie stuff out for too long, and imo, it could have been contained to one episode. So I tried to re imagine some stuff, and tried to view it from every characters POV.

_**Prologue**_

„_Am I dead?"_

_Just as she says the words, the world around her shifts. __It's not noticeable at first, but she feels it. It's a shiver even though it's not cold._

_Her head hurts and she feels the need to sit down._

_William sits there on his barstool, contemplative as usual. She wants to smack him._

"_Not dead, not if you don't want to be"_

_Then there's a light before everything seems to vanish before her eyes. Mandy, the customers, the Jukebox in the corner. Until it's her and him._

„_Do you want to go home?"_

_She finds herself nodding even though she has no idea what is going on._

_For the first time in her life home isn't a ramshackle backroad house and shouting in the middle of the night. It's a nice white church and the smell of coffee and the ocean and the flow of water._

_It's something else too, something she knows she should know._

_William still sits on his barstool and tells her to go. __He points towards a dirt road leading into a forest._

„_Home is behind those trees, that's where he'll be"._

_She's not in control of her body. Her feet move of their own volition towards the darkness._

_When she's at the edge, she looks back one more time._

_He's gone._

_She's going home. _


	2. Can't Find You

Can't Find You

"NATHAN!"

He jolts awake and anxiously searches the room.

When he realises that he only heard her echo in his dreams, he drops back down and stares at the ceiling. There's a stain of something or other up there and he shudders.

He imagines his heartbeat slowing down, one less beat per minute. Until it stops altogether and leaves only a dull aching behind. Mindlessly, he lays his hand there.

Then the realisation hits him that something is different.

He's never pretended to be psychic, but still.

Outside the window a car passes by and someone shouts profanities and there's a strange crackling in the air.

He drags a chair over the window because the feeling is overwhelming. He's hasn't felt it since that night at the high school reunion, in those two blissful minutes he held her close.

He waits until three am when the memory fades and the dull aching returns.

„Nathan"

It's soft and barely audible but it was there.

He sits by the window and for the first time in five and a half months, Nathan Wournos is smiling.

Duke Crocker has had many types of welcomes.

Sometimes involving fists and blood, sometimes tacos, sometimes a beautiful woman.

But never has it involved a show at the aquarium.

The cops drag him out out of the tank, muttering about the local nuthouse and wasting their time.

It takes a full hour before he realises where he is and one minute to come up with a plan to escape.

Audrey, need to find Audrey.

_The path in the woods is narrow and the tree lines keeps creeping closer and closer._

_Her feet hurt, she's cold and nothing magical happens._

_She was hoping it would._

He lost count of how many bruises he has.

Not that he feels them, but he sees them scattered over his body.

He absently runs his fingers over his ribcage, where the bones protrude.

Five and a half months of living on beer and burgers have taken their toll without alerting him.

There's a tingle near the base of his spine, a really light pressure. Almost like a poke.

He jumps and turns around but only finds an empty room.

50 miles away, Jennifer Mason comes home to her prison.

Not a literal prison though it may as well be.

Before the voices, before Audrey and her pleading and the images of a white room, this was her sanctuary.

She flops down on the couch and turns on the tv.

„HER NAME IS AUDREY PARKER!"

And all of the sudden, the voices make sense.


	3. Human Remains

3. Human Remains

He's forgotten what it was like.

Bodies turned into states he didn't think they were capable of.

People manipulating bodies to freeze and to burn and to die.

He talks Marion into giving up her love, to let him go.

While he's never been good at speeches, the words leave him effortlessly.

She'd be proud.

_"This is not love."_

But who is he to judge?

_The room is white, and there's a faint beeping in the distance._

_She rests her hand over where she thinks it's coming from._

_She counts. . Hundred._

He hasn't downed any beer in four days.

It's an odd realisation in the middle of the night but still.

He listens to the silence and he could swear there's something else as well.

A steady thumping noise, odd and yet familiar.

He's heard it before. He counts.

One. . One Hundred.

The plastic bottle fits her hand so perfectly.

She wonders why that is. Why cigarettes and pill bottles and bottle necks are shaped the way they are.

She rattles the bottle, not quite ready to let them go just yet.

But she wants to be brave. She has to be brave.

Duke would like that.

So when he stands beside her, she upturns the bottle and the pills disappear under the surface of the water.

Conrad is buried at Eastside on a rainy Saturday morning.

After the reverend and the funeral crowd have left, he stands beside Marion next to the grave.

"Did you love her?"

He nods, as he always does when someone asks this question.

"From the first moment you saw her?"

He nods again.

"Can you still feel her?"

He thinks of the thumping sound from a few nights ago. Slow, steady, one hundred per minute.

He looks over at her, her blue tear stained eyes now bright and clear.

"Then you have hope, Nathan Wournos. Don't you dare give up on that."

_"Hi there"_

_He stands in the doorway, looking at her curiously._

_Kind, he is kind._

_He reads her chart, checks out the flowers a candy striper left on the nightstand._

_She grabs his sleeve as he leaves._

_"Home. Want to go home."_


End file.
